PHOENIX — If the current population trends continue, Arizona will have a bit more influence in Washington after the 2030 census.
And California and New York will have less than they do now. A lot less.
That’s the analysis of Election Data Services which studies figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and figures out how that will affect how many seats in the U.S. House each state will get. And based on its projections, the company figures Arizona’s population, now about 7.4 million will reach close to 8 million.
If the trends hold, that means the state will get an additional seat after the decennial count, bringing the total to 10.
But the predictions are based on more than just pure population growth.
That’s because congressional representation is a zero-sum game: There are only 435 seats to go around.
So that states losing population — or even whose growth is not keeping up, are going to have to shed a representative.
Or more.
Based on estimates California will actually lose four seats in the House, said Kimball Brace, president of EDS. But the mostly Democratic state will still have 48 representatives, more than any other.
New York, another largely Democratic stronghold, will lose three. That would still leave it with 23 representatives.
At the other extreme, at the current growth rate, heavily Republican Texas will have four more members in the House, bringing its total to 42. And Florida, also a state dominated by the GOP, stands to gain three to bring its representation up to 31.
And there’s another factor at play in dividing up those House seats.
Every state, no matter how small, is entitled to a representative. So that takes seven states which have only one seat in the House out of the mix, seats that, under other circumstances, could be reapportioned to faster growing states.
Brace said whether the trends to GOP-dominated states lead to a political shift in Congress is not a simple question.
“In the overall trend, it’s better on the Republican side,’’ he told Capitol Media Services.
But Brace said there’s another factor at play: the process that takes place in each state every 10 years redrawing the lines for the congressional districts.
In many states that process is purely political, with the decisions left to state lawmakers. And they tend to craft districts that are favorable to the majority party.
Still, there are constraints, including federal laws that make it illegal to act in ways that dilute minority voting strength.
That generally means ensuring that certain groups — Blacks in some states and Hispanics in others — have the same chance of electing someone of their choice as they did before.
Then there are states like Arizona.
While Republicans outnumber Democrats — and currently control of the House and Senate — there actually are more political independents than those in either party.
And there’s something else.
In 2000, Arizona voters wrested control of the decennial redistricting process away from lawmakers — the people who had drawn lines favorable to the GOP majority — and instead created the Independent Redistricting Commission, a panel of two Republicans, two Democrats and a political independent who is chosen by the other four.
That law requires the panel to consider various factors, like respecting communities of interest, using county boundaries when possible, and having districts of roughly equal population. The commission also is required to create as many politically competitive districts as possible, those where a candidate from either party has a chance of winning.
And then there are those same federal laws that preclude enacting maps that dilute minority voting strength.
But all those guardrails have not eliminated complaints that politics still plays a role.
The first process resulted in litigation that lasted nearly a decade as Democrats and Hispanics charged that the panel had short-changed them.
Democrats did better after the 2010 census when Republicans charged that the Colleen Mathis, the independent who chaired the new panel, was siding with Democrats.
That played out over the decade, with the 2020 election — the last run under the old maps — resulting in a congressional delegation of five Democrats and four Republicans.
The situation was reversed with a new commission chosen after the 2020 census, with Democrats this time complaining that Erika Newberg, who chaired the panel, sided with Republicans. Whatever the truth of those complaints, the state now has six Republicans in the U.S. House and three Democrats.
All that will have to play out again after the 2030 census — when the state should have 10 House seats — with a new redistricting commission.
As it turns out, Brace said, Arizona should have gotten that 10th congressional seat after the 2020 census.
The official numbers — the ones released by the Census Bureau in 2021 after being delayed due to COVID and the ones used to divide up House seats — showed Arizona 79,509 residents away from that goal.
He noted, however, the agency just this past month released revised numbers for what they believe was the population in 2020. And that figure, Brace said, showed Arizona had not just enough for 10 congressional districts but another 111,058 to spare.
Blame COVID, he said.
“That delayed everything from the Census Bureau standpoint which pushed things back and caused them to no do some of the activities they had done before to verify and cross-check and that sort of stuff,” Brace explained.
He also said the Census Bureau has recognized “they’ve got to do something different and better.
“But 2020 was not the year to do that,” Brace continued. In fact, he said, some of the progress the agency had made in prior years about undercounts and overcounts “got reversed in 2020, not only because of COVID but because they didn’t get the time to experiment with and implement some changes because of the delayed timetable.
Finally, Brace cautioned that any prognostication of state populations in 2030 at this point come with a very big caveat: It depends on factors that can’t be anticipated.
Consider, he said, the projections for the first half of the 2000s decade which had indicated that Louisiana would gain a set in the 2010 Census.
“However, hurricane Katrina hit the state in 2005 and caused much of New Orleans’ population to move elsewhere,” Brace said. “By the time the 2010 Census was taken, the resulting reapportionment showed the state actually losing a congressional district instead of gaining a seat.”
What also can matter, he said, are changes in the economy, especially when people are unable to sell the houses they have and move elsewhere.
